Teaching Common Law in A Country without Common Law Tradition - Its Necessity and Approach -

Abstract

China has traditionally focused on teaching legal knowledge to undergraduate and graduate students rather than providing professional skills education; however, since the end of the twentieth century, legal education in China started to fundamentally change both institutionally and pedagogically. The first part of this paper will describe the basic characteristics of legal education embraced in China as traditionally continental countries. The second part will introduce the trend of reforms of legal education since the end of last century. In part three I will make some comparisons on the approaches to reform of legal education with U.S. The fouth part will depict the endeavors of the pedagogies for nurturing lawyers provided in new Jurist Programs. The last part will concentrate on the opportunities and challenges that the legal educators are facing after drawing the key features of different approaches in terms of education reform.